Corning, the 175-year-old glass and fiber optics maker, is drawing fresh attention from investors as demand for fiber infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence data centers lifts its stock. Investor's Business Daily named Corning its "Stock of the Day," citing the company's positioning as a direct beneficiary of the AI build-out sweeping the technology industry.
According to Investor's Business Daily, Corning's gains are being driven by what the outlet calls an "AI data center play" — a reference to the massive amounts of fiber optic cabling required to connect the servers, GPUs, and networking equipment packed inside modern AI facilities. As technology companies race to expand their data center capacity to train and run AI models, demand for the physical cables that carry data at the speed of light is climbing sharply.
Corning is one of the world's largest producers of optical fiber and fiber cable, putting it in a rare position: a legacy industrial manufacturer that stands to gain directly from the AI investment boom, without being a chip designer or cloud provider. Its products are effectively the plumbing behind the internet infrastructure that AI depends on.
The stock's recognition as IBD's pick of the day signals that Wall Street is increasingly looking beyond the obvious AI winners — Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon — to the picks-and-shovels suppliers making the physical infrastructure possible. For everyday investors, Corning represents a more grounded way to bet on AI's growth: not on which models win, but on the cables that connect them all.